Assisted Living

The average age of U.S. Senators is 62. Three-quarters of them are male. Over 90 percent are white.

These elected officials have aides, free meals and free health care. They basically do almost nothing for themselves; some of them may not even read reports or attend hearings except, of course, the highly publicized ones.

That's why I consider the Senate an assisted living facility. It's where we park senior citizens in their golden years. Should they have an occasional "senior moment" we forgive them. How charming.

The Senate also happens to be the place where we badly need leadership to help us weather the Covid-19 pandemic, the unemployment epidemic and the crisis over racial injustice.

Having lived briefly in another assisted living facility (I didn't win an election to the Senate), I can attest that there are certain signs you look for when a fellow resident is in decline. Of course, you start with the assumption that we all are in decline -- why else would be in here?

It could be as simple as no one wants us anymore. Maybe our families don't have room for us; same with our friends. Our partner is gone to death or divorce, and the word is that we are not all that good at living on our own.

The logic of moving in with 100 other old people is you will all have one thing in common -- age -- even if you've never met any of them before.

Once all of these kinds of thoughts have had their way with you, you return to the indisputable fact that you watch every day for the signs of decline among your peers. It becomes a fixation.

It is in this context that I watched, along with millions of others, as President Trump (now 74) had difficulty walking down a ramp at West Point on Saturday and also had to use both hands to lift a glass of water to his mouth during his visit.

You slow down on stairs because you are afraid of falling. If you are having balance issues, going down stairs is far more scary than going up them.

When lifting a glass to your lips becomes difficult, the first choice you make is simply not to drink in front of people. It's too embarrassing. But when you really need to drink, because you are thirsty or some food is caught in your throat, you grasp the glass with one hand and push it from the bottom with your other.

That is what Trump did on Saturday.

The bit about having trouble swallowing, which is often why you really need that glass of liquid, is another problem for aging people. There's this little flap at the lid of your esophagus that is supposed to open and close automatically when you swallow things. (In case this starts happening to you there are preventive exercises you can do; personally I found them useless because I couldn't swallow at all while doing them.)

Problem is, as you age, that flap can atrophy just like all of your other muscles until you feel like a veritable cross of Mister Floppy and Mister Gumby out there in public.

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Now we've taken this delightful tour of gerontology, let's turn our (limited) eyesight to more inspiring visions, such as hummingbirds and butterflies and bats.

Bats? Like fruit flies, bats share much of our DNA and also they just happen to have all the bones we do, plus large wings to fly about as they please. Anderson Cooper hosted a special on bats this weekend, which is well worth tracking down as we shelter in place in our caves.

Unlike us, bats seem to be able to protect themselves from diseases like Covid-19, so scientists are researching whether we might be able to acquire immunity courtesy of our winged relatives.

It's much like a baseball game, where you live or die by your bats.

Speaking of baseball, there's talk of a season still, but it would be vastly reduced in scope from 162 games to just 50. As a fan and an amateur statistician, I object. What if a player hits for a .440 average and breaks Hugh Duffy's all-time single-season record?

How big an asterisk would we have to put next to his name in the Hall of Fame?

Preoccupations with horrific prospects like that definitely are preferable to obsessing over how many of the known or unknown symptoms of Covid-19 you may be exhibiting, particularly if in general you remain asymptomatic from a diagnostic perspective.

Where does all of this leave us?

"You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything."

-- Aaron Tippin / William Brock / William Calhoun Jr. Brock

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